The Koch brothers have been spamming lawmakers’ inboxes to defund net neutrality in your name.
According to Politico, members of Congress have reported a recent flood of messages ostensibly from constituents who oppose net neutrality rules, but they are actually coming from addresses outside of members’ districts.
This week Koch connected group American Commitment boasted that it helped direct more than 1.6 million messages from more than half a million constituents to members of the House and Senate. Some of these messages encouraged lawmakers to defund the FCC’s new net neutrality rules.
Last year, the Sunlight Foundation caught American Commitment red handed submitting shady form letters in response to the FCC’s net neutrality rules. American Commitment was responsible for more than half of the 1.6 million comments criticizing the rules.
For their part, American Commitment could not have been more delighted with the Sunlight Foundation’s findings. President Phil Kerpen, former aide to Americans for Prosperity, the Koch’s political arm, said this in a press release: “We’re pleased that the Sunlight Foundation is finally confirming that American Commitment and Americans opposed to regulation of the Internet won the FCC comment period. Better late than never.”
When asked this time around about impersonating constituents, Kerpen responded, “we’re aware that other groups used identical language in their campaigns and we cannot speak to those efforts.” According to Politico, “Kerpen acknowledged there could have been some ’data or delivery issue’ with emails he helped corral, before suggesting that other groups might be behind the missteps.”
Politico also noted that the staff of Rep. Jackie Speier of California calculates that 98 percent of the net neutrality emails her office received were people they’d never heard from before. When contacted, several constituents said they had never sent emails criticizing net neutrality. “This is identity theft,” Speier said. “But instead of impersonating for financial gain, the originators of this theft are striking at the heart of our representative democracy.”
The Koch brothers and their cronies will stop at nothing to get the message across — even if it means potentially impersonating you to do it.